17 per cent addresses snapped up 80 per cent of Ethereum NFTs since April 2021
Moonstream, an open source blockchain analytics firm, has recently published a report stating that 17 per cent of addresses have control of more than 80 per cent NFTs on Ethereum.
The report, published on October 21, informed that the study was conducted in a time span between April 1 and September 25, 2021, on over 7 billion NFT transactions on the Ethereum blockchain.
Moonstream’s report has found that NFT platforms, whales and exchanges comprise the top 16.71 per cent of all addresses, owning about 80.98 per cent of NFTs on Ethereum.
The remaining 83.29 per cent of NFT owners had only been able to snap a “handful of tokens” during the given time period.
Further, Moonstream said that the latter statistic actually requires “a little more nuance” interpretation as many of the owners are originally marketplaces and clearinghouses like Nifty Gateway, OpenSea and other platforms of the same category.
The figures in the report seem almost to replicate the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 rule that comprises a common factor across different markets and industries. The principle is grounded on the idea that roughly 80 per cent of consequences come from 20 per cent of the causes.
A Reddit user by the name “xddemonesque”, in response to the report has commented that it is “fascinating” to witness the Pareto principle held in a market “as avant-garde and traditionally irrational.”
Moonstream’s report also focuses on ERC 721 tokens without including any data from Layer 2 networks like Polygon. It also does not source its data from centralized Application Programming Interface’s (APIs).
The report states that the study’s scope has been1,145,767 blocks yielding transfer activity for 7,020,950 tokens derived from 9,292 NFT contracts across 727,102 addresses. These are the “mints” and “transfers” forming the core data set, it explained.
Moonstream highlighted that there is a “great inequality” of NFT ownership on Ethereum, arguing that the NFT market is wide open for small investors to participate. It also pointed out that most NFT holders are “small-time traders” who had been able to purchase their respective assets with relative ease.
As per the data, the Ethereum NFT market is open in that the vast majority of its primary participants are small-time purchasers who most likely make purchases manually.
The report found that as per the data sets, there are “few barriers to entry” for willing participants in the market.
